prose

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A ringing phone

I hear a phone that is not answered. I listen for some time. The ringtone trails off and seems to leave an echo in my brain.

Where is the owner of the phone. Is he/she still alive. Has something gone wrong or are they merely indisposed.

This might be an important call…

  • it’s your boss
  • it’s your angry spouse
  • it’s your worried mother
  • it’s debt collections
  • it’s your broke friend

Who calls rather than texts anyhow.

I linger for some time to see how it plays out. Like looking at an empty, banged-up vehicle. Resting by a lamppost after a crash.

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The goings on at the ponds

Photo by Cassandra Keenan

The great egrets shunned the other waterfowl.

The egrets were staying in Vegas as part of their winter migrational route. Like an ivy league clique, they stuck up their bills while congregating in a lush, green riparian grove, which made their white plumage all the more stunning — like fresh-fallen snow.

And they knew it.

Meanwhile, the gambel’s quail were skittish, despite being on their year-round turf. They ran from the paparazzi as per usual, head plumes bobbing as they made for the clearings, taking cover in the bramble. Continue reading →

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Ever-rest

Holding my breath until the weekend. Some weeks feel like ascending Everest—with its peak being my two days off, of course.

Everest even contains the word “rest,” as well as “ever,” which to me means perpetual leisure and not death. Imagine having leisure forever.

This would not be like something enjoyed by a vampire, for even they have to work after sundown, seeking victim after victim to feed upon. Though Lugosi made it look effortless and then just crawled into his coffin while others in his part of the world were just waking up.

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Shell

Once I found a seashell that I still have to this day. It was carried ashore by the belligerent tide at Jones Beach State Park in New York when I was a child. And now, as I feel tossed by my turbulent thoughts and frozen by frightening uncertainties, I hold onto it for solace — my seaside talisman

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On personal solubility

I’ve pinned a button onto my jacket that denotes me as soluble. Pure and simple. It’s a blue button with white text.

  • I’ve a high potential for condensation. I feel I could dissolve like salt in warm water.
  • In an argument, I can disintegrate into clumps like acrylic in an acetone bath.
  • Don’t ever wet me or expose me to sudden cold. I need to acclimate to avoid eventual evaporation.
  • When I think of soluble, I recall the Wicked Witch of the West withering. I think of candle wax burning.
  • If I had it my way, I would rather not leave this Earth in water form. I would prefer to splatter into fiery sparks.
  • Or else become a genie fog that curls into a porcelain lamp like a plume of vape smoke traveling back inside your mouth.
  • Or drift past the Milky Way into the starry spray of the multiverse.
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Lofty living with my cat

Flatiron Building

When my cat is on my bed there is nothing left for her to attain. In her feline world, it is the pinnacle of places in which to rest and roam.

My bed is like New York City, where there is nowhere left to go. Meaning, anywhere else is a step down. So you just park yourself and enjoy the view — in this case, a skyline of book piles — some of them hefty tomes resting vertically like architectural showpieces.

My book on contemporary collage art can be the Flatiron Building, while certain stacks of literary paperbacks — built with the biggest on the bottom to the smallest on the top — evoke skyscrapers of note: Central Park Tower.; the Woolworth Building; 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Continue reading →

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Morning Meanderings

A cow’s moo and the muffled grunt of Frankenstein’s monster (Karloff). Compare & contrast.

**

I am in my cocoon right now, complete with classical music (Chopin’s Mazurkas) coffee and Wayne Koestenbaum’s Pink Trance Notebooks, dudes. In a bubble I might instead be listening to Bach or Brahms and per chance reading Bukowski?

**

Thought in the back of my mind is … 2019 is just crazy tawk.